Winter Collages

For Art Exploration on Saturday I had my students tear paper and glue it down to paper that had diluted blue, black and purple paint rolled onto it. We added daubs of white paint and finished off with oil pastel drawings of animals on clear adhesive shelf liner 

My demo piece for the lesson

 I especially love the drawings of each animal. This class contains mostly ages three and four yeatrs old and their drawings are always so much fun to see

Camp

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week i taught the Winter Break Camp at Artspace. Camp lessons are an hour and fifteen minutes and planning for them involves more steps and detail than a regular hour long class. There is nothing I dread more than hearing thirty minutes into a class than "Teacher, I'm finished"

Of course I hear the dulcet sounds of that phrase nearly every lesson I teach  the younger groups (aged 3-6) so the dread is in the anticipation of it as much as in the utterance. I've gotten pretty good at redirecting back to the art but there's a good chance that the I'm done will be so complete for whatever reason (it's the last day of camp and it's two days until christmas and I'm just done already!) that I have to allow for it and hope that it's not contagious which it can be and then am I ever in for a bout of mild chaos.

This camp was no exception and I was prepared with an extra project on day one, the instruction to make another and as many as you can get to on day two and a fresh sheet with all the colours on day three.

So camp rundown:

Day 1:
multi step painting and collage of a winter forest sunrise to celebrate the Solstice

Winter Wonderland Party

Last week I led a birthday party of 3 to 6 year olds in a winter wonderland themed party. The request was for something that was Frozen like but not a Frozen theme. The challenge was to include something that would refer to the movie without being specific.

With that criteria in mind I came up with a Winter wonderland diorama that made use of tissue paper, painted paper, painting and snowflake cutting. I then led the party in making snowmen to place in their wonderland. If this theme comes around again I'll incorporate the puff paint to the project as well. Hind sight is so 20/20.